A Room with a View An Interpretation of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View by Rob Doll © 2002-2011 At the beginning of A Room with a View, when he overhears Lucy Honeychurch and Miss Bartlett complaining that they did not get the rooms with views they had been promised in the Pension Bertolini, another guest interrupts, saying, "I have a view, I have a view. . . . This is my son . . . his name's George. He has a view , too." Mr. Emerson is speaking of their views of the river, but the Forsterian text has a double meaning. The Emersons' view has to do with more than the quality of their accommodations; they have what for Forster is a superior view of life. This philosophical view which the Emersons offer and which Lucy eventually accepts, is implied in the literal view that the Emersons relinquish with their room: It was pleasant . . . to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road. Over the river men were at work. . . .

Platforms were overflowing with Italians. . . . Then soldiers appeared . . . Beside them walked officers . . . and before them went little boys. The literal view, then, is of monuments and scenery and of the Italian people who live amidst these things under the Italian sun. The average middle-class English person who looks out this window appreciates the scenery and disdains the people. Only the unconventional Mr. Emerson treats the Italians equally as human beings and sees that they possess the unencumbered emotion, the lack of which makes the English incomplete. In Chapter Five, "Possibilities of a Pleasant Outing," Mr. Eager, the resident English chaplain, praises a view that select Bertolini tourists could see from the hills on the way to Fiesole--a "view that Alessio Baldovinetti is fond of introducing into his pictures." Mr. Eager's connections with the English residential colony also allow the possibility of having tea at a Renaissance villa with one of those Englishmen who, "living in delicate seclusion, . . .

read, wrote, studied, and exchanged ideas, thus attaining to that intimate knowledge, or rather perception, of Florence which is denied to all who carry in their pockets the coupons of Cook." Of course, these people do not have an "intimate" perception of Italy at all; for they, like the inferior tourists of the Bertolini, see only a part of what Italy is; their "delicate seclusion" keeps them from the hearty reality of the Italian people. Mr. Eager, commenting on the murder the previous day in the Piazza Signoria, reveals his affinity with these privileged ones: This very square--so I am told--witnessed yesterday the most sordid of tragedies. To one who loves the Florence of Dante and Savonarola there is something portentous in such desecration--portentous and humiliating. The irony is obvious. The Italy of Dante and Savonarola was full of passion and murder; the very spirit that engendered Renaissance high culture produced violence like that Mr. Eager deplores. In the novel Italy represents the proper balance between intellect and emotion, between culture and simple humanity. This balance was presented in Where Angels Fear to Tread in the scene at the opera.

At one point in A Room with a View Mr. Emerson says that love is "not the body, but of the body." Equally, its culture is not Italy, but of Italy. This is the broader view that Mr. Emerson has and that Lucy eventually acquires. Both of them appreciate the art and the scenery of Italy, but they also love the people and share their emotional life. In Chapter Six the tourists go on the drive they had planned the day before: "The Reverend Arthur Beebe, . . . [etc.], Drive out in Carriages to See a View: Italians Drive them." They do not, however, go for tea at a villa, because Mr. Eager would be mortified to introduce the improper Emersons to the Florentine elite. When the Italian driver brings his girl along for the ride, the English are confronted with the side of Italy they usually manage to ignore. The two lovers "were sporting disgracefully" behind the backs of Miss Bartlett and Mr. Eager, who is busy pointing out a villa in which some critics believe a scene from The Decameron was set.

Of course many of the goings on in Boccaccio's work make the sporting of the driver and his girl friend seem pale. When the driver pays more attention to his girl than to his driving, the carriage lurches forward and Mr. Eager turns to find the Italians kissing. Although Mr. Emerson defends them, Mr. Eager makes the girl get down and declares, "Victory at last." Mr. Emerson, with his comprehensive vision, replies, "It is not victory. . . . It is defeat. You have parted two people who were happy." Lucy remains silent, but she envies the Italians their bliss, for the previous day she had had an experience that began to awaken her to the Emerson view. The day before, on the way home from a shop where she had bought a photograph of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," Lucy entered the Piazza Signoria thinking, "Nothing ever happens to me." The Piazza is beautiful in the twilight of evening, but: Lucy desired more. She fixed her eyes wistfully on the tower of the palace which rose out of the lower darkness like a pillar of roughened gold.

It seemed no longer a tower, no longer supported by earth, but some unattainable treasure throbbing in the tranquil sky. Its brightness mesmerized her, still dancing before her eyes when she bent them to the ground and started towards home. Then something did happen. Lucy wants sexual fulfilment. She has bought the photo of Venus in spite of Charlotte Bartlett's declaring the nakedness a "pity." And with that symbol of the exposed female she walks into the shadow of the male tower. Lucy faints at the sight of the blood splattered about in the stabbing and she awakes in the arms of George Emerson: an Italian dies and English people are born into love. In the course of the murder Lucy's photograph of the naked Venus has been stained with blood; symbolically, Lucy has lost her virginity. Her tourist souvenir--and her socially conditioned response to Italy--have come into contact with the real Italy. This "symbolic moment" does not result in immediate change in Lucy's life, but a seed has been planted. It takes the last three-quarters of the novel to work out in social terms the marriage that has been symbolically consummated here.

In A Room with a View the day after her experience in the plaza, Lucy goes on the carriage drive and finds herself envying the Italian lovers' embrace; however, at the end of Chapter Six her own experience of the day before is reinforced. The tourists have descended from their carriages and broken into groups to see the view from the hillside. Lucy and George accidentally meet in a profusion of flowers: He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her. Before she could speak, almost before she could feel, a voice called, "Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!" The silence of life had been broken by Miss Bartlett, who stood brown against the view. In the rest of the novel Lucy is caught in a conflict between the forces of middle-class repression--represented here by Miss Bartlett--and the force of her own passionate self, which Italy and the Emersons have made her begin to see. Aided by Charlotte, Lucy resists her love for George, fleeing to Rome and thence to England, where she becomes engaged to Cecil Vyse.

In England those people who had found the non-human aspect of Italy--the art and the scenery--most important, integrate this warped view into their lives, using Italian phrases and comparing English things to things Italian. Cecil likes Lucy because she is "leonardesque"; Miss Bartlett calls Lucy "Lucia." Lucy, however, has returned to England with a different experience of Italy. Life, so far as she troubled to conceive it, was a circle of rich, pleasant people, with identical interests and identical foes. In this circle one thought, married and died. Outside it were poverty and vulgarity, for ever trying to enter, just as the London fog tries to enter the pine-woods, pouring through the gaps in the northern hills. But in Italy, where anyone who chooses may warm himself in equality, as in the sun, this conception of life vanished. Her senses expanded; she felt that there was no one whom she might not get to like, that social barriers were irremovable, doubtless, but not particularly high. You jump over them just as you jump into a peasant's olive-yard in the Apennines, and he is glad to see you. She returned with new eyes. . . .

For Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions--her own soul. It takes Lucy a while to accept what Italy offers her; but she eventually breaks off her engagement to Cecil when she finally realizes he is pompous and insufferable. She is saved from going to Greece with two old maids--a course of action that would confirm her in the spinsterly ways of Charlotte Bartlett--by a last minute meeting with Mr. Emerson, who convinces her to admit and act upon her love for George. He had robbed the body of its taint, the world's taunts of their sting; she had shown her the holiness of direct desire. She "never exactly understood", she would say in after years, "how he managed to strengthen her. It was as if he had made her see the whole of everything at once." That Lucy has indeed attained the inclusive vision of Mr. Emerson is confirmed at the very end of the novel, when--from the same window in the Pension Bertolini--Lucy answers the appeal of an Italian coach driver, not with the brusqueness of an Eager or Bartlett, but with simple human kindness.

As the story ends, the love of George and Lucy is associated with the larger forces of the earth: ". . . they were conscious of a love more mysterious . . . they heard the river, bearing down the snows of winter into the Mediterranean." SparkNotes: A Room with a View: Summary A Room with a View E.M. Forster Context Characters Lucy Honeychurch, a young upper middle class woman, visits Italy under the charge of her older cousin Charlotte. At their pension, or guesthouse, in Florence, they are given rooms that look into the courtyard rather than out over the river Arno. Mr. Emerson, a fellow guest, generously offers them the rooms belonging to himself and his son George. Although Charlotte is offended by Mr. Emerson's lack of tact and propriety, she finally does agree to the switch. Lucy is an avid young pianist. Mr. Beebe, watches her passionate playing and predicts that someday she will live her life with as much gusto as she plays the piano. Lucy's visit to Italy is marked by several significant encounters with the Emersons. In Santa Croce church, George complains that his father means well, but always offends everyone. Mr.

Emerson tells Lucy that his son needs her in order to overcome his youthful melancholy. Later, Lucy is walking in the Piazza Signoria, feeling dull, when she comes in close contact with two quarreling Italian men. One man stabs the other, and she faints, to be rescued by George. On their return trip home, he kisses her, much to her surprise. She keeps his rash behavior a secret. On a country outing in the hills, Lucy wanders in search of Mr. Beebe and the supercilious chaplain, Mr. Eager. However, the Italian cab driver leads her instead to George, who is standing on a terrace covered with blue violets. George sees her and again kisses her, but this time Charlotte sees him and chastises him after they have resurnedreturned to the pension. She leaves with Lucy for Rome the next day. The second half of the book centers on Lucy's home in Surrey, where she lives with her mother, Mrs. Honeychurch, and her brother, Freddy. A man she met in Rome, the snobbish Cecil Vyse, proposes marriage to her for the third time, and she accepts him.

He disapproves of her family and the country people she knows, finding them coarse and unsophisticated. There is a small, ugly villa available for rent in the town, and as a joke, Cecil offers it to the Emersons, whom he meets by chance in a museum. They take him up on the offer and move in, much to Lucy's initial horror. George plays tennis with the Honeychurches on a Sunday when Cecil is at his most intolerable. After the game, Cecil reads from a book by Miss Lavish, a woman who also stayed with Lucy and Charlotte at the pension in Florence. The novel records a kiss among violets, and Lucy realizes that Charlotte let the secret out. In a moment alone, George kisses her again. Lucy tells him to leave, but George insists that Cecil is not the right man for her, characterizing Cecil as controlling and appreciative of things rather than people. Lucy sees Cecil in a new light, and breaks off her engagement that night. However, Lucy will not believe that she loves George; she wants to stay unmarried and travel to Greece with some elderly women she met in Italy, the Miss Alans. She meets old Mr.

Emerson by chance, who insists that she loves George and should marry him, because it is what her soul truly wants. Lucy realizes he is right, and though she must fly against convention, she marries George, and the book ends with the happy couple staying together in the Florence pension again, in a room with a view. Analysis The book depicts Lucy's struggles as she emerges as her own woman, growing from indecision to fulfillment. She struggles between strict, old-fashioned Victorian values and newer, more liberal mores. In this struggle Lucy's own idea of what is true evolves and matures. Her trip to Italy opens her sheltered eyes to ideas and people unlike those she has known growing up in the English countryside. She also notices how freely Italian classes seem to mix, and realizes that the social boundaries she has always regarded as fixed are actually arbitrary. Her experience with the Emersons shows her that there can be beauty in the things that are considered improper, and Charlotte's betrayal shows her that propriety is not always the best judge of what is true. Having more clearly found herself in Italy, Lucy's real test lies at home, where she must confront her old familiar surroundings.

She is still uncertain, however, and confused about what to think about her new experiences. That she missteps and becomes engaged to the pretentious and domineering Cecil shows her susceptibility to the pressures of society. As her bold piano playing suggests, she is cut out for a more daring life, if only she could cut herself away from the restricting social boundaries that engulf her. The Emersons, as free-thinking, modern, truth-loving people, are her deliverers from the grips of society. It is this freedom that allows her to see beyond the dictates of propriety that forbid her marriage to the lower-class George and, therefore, to follow her heart. George is troubled by existential worries in Italy. He doesn't understand how life can be truly joyful and worthwhile when it is always shadowed by enigma, symbolized by the question mark that he hangs on the wall of his hotel. Lucy, though cautious, is loving by nature and enjoys life even when it challenges her understanding. The two are united by a shared appreciation for beauty, which might be captured in their love of views: Lucy adores the view of the Arno through the pension window, while George's first memory is of himself and his parents gazing at a view.

Each possesses what the other needs: George finds simple joys staying with the Honeychurch family, while Lucy finds the courage to recognize her own individuality through her contact with the Emersons. A Room with a View is one of Forster's early works, and is not as complex as the more mature Howard's End and Passage to India. However, its strength lies in its vivid cast of characters, humorous dialogue, and comedic play upon the manners of the day, and in Forster's engaging, sympathetic exploration of Lucy's character. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster - Reading Guide - PenguinRandomHouse.com Questions and Topics for Discussion INTRODUCTION In a journal entry from July, 1910, E. M. Forster wrote, “However gross my desires, I find that I shall never satisfy them for the fear of annoying others. I am glad to come across this much good in me. It serves instead of purity.” Although Forster wrote this passage some two years after he published A Room with a View, it could have been written at almost anytime during his long life.

However much he understood the “holiness of direct desire,” the emotional purity one achieves by following the heart rather than social orthodoxy, he spent his youth and young adulthood, as Lucy Honeychurch nearly did, repressing his sexual desires to adhere to the expectations of society. Forster was only twenty-nine years old when he published A Room with a View in 1908. He had already published two books,Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907). He was a respected writer, but not yet a famous one, and the themes touched on in his earlier novels—passion and convention, truth and pretense—were now given complexity and eloquence, with the maturity of a more experienced voice, in his third novel. The first seeds for an Italian novel were planted during an extended trip to Florence that Forster and his mother took in 1901. This journey not only unleashed Forster’s creativity, but also provided a source of spiritual release from the rigid moral codes of English society.

His depression over his own self-deception and his increasing mistrust of English middle-class society are mirrored in the conflicted relationship between the cautious, thoroughly English Honeychurches and the impulsive, free-spirited, socialist Emersons. Forster was tormented, like Lucy, with the possibility of becoming one of “the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words.” While Lucy embodied Forster’s internal strife, Mr. Emerson was created in the image of a man Forster admired, Edward Carpenter, a social pioneer who believed in equality for women and open expression of homosexual love. First through his published works, and later as a friend, Carpenter was to Forster a beacon of spiritual and sexual liberation who guided him toward a deeper understanding of himself. For Lucy, Mr.

Emerson is the “kind old man who enabled her to see the lights dancing in the Arno,” who encourages her to follow her heart’s and her body’s desire, explaining that “love is of the body; not the body, but of the body.” This advice she must heed, as Forster makes sure, in breaking from the fettered world of Windy Corner and choosing truth over deceit. The happy resolution of A Room with a View did not come easily to Forster. He started work in earnest on the first draft of his novel in 1902, setting the story entirely in Italy. Forster began the final version in 1904, but put it aside to complete Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Longest Journey. Forster would not pick up A Room with a View again until 1907, when he commented to a friend, “It’s bright and merry and I like the story. Yet I wouldn’t and couldn’t finish it in the same style.” Completing the work would require another full year. The “bright and merry” surface of the novel owes much to the social comedies of Jane Austen and Henry James.

Like the heroines of Mansfield Park and Daisy Miller, Lucy begins the novel as a naif on the threshold of adulthood in a strange new world. Forster captures the pretense and manners of her social world with uncanny acuity. As Virginia Woolf wrote, “The social historian will find his books full of illuminating information. . . . Old maids blow into their gloves when they take them off. Mr. Forster is a novelist . . . who sees his people in close contact with their surroundings.” Like his forebears, he described the world around him with remarkable precision and insight. Forster readily acknowledged his debt to the 19th-century domestic comedy, but said that he “tried to hitch it on to other things”—to the deeper themes of his work, such as the struggle for individuality and the barriers of social class. Forster’s plots and landscapes carry greater metaphorical weight than those of his predecessors: Lucy’s anguish in choosing between George and Cecil becomes a contest of modernity against the middle ages, honesty against hypocrisy, clarity against muddle. This subtext provides a richly textured counterpoint to superficial events. The novel’s ending is not unambiguously joyful.

It almost seems that Forster allowed George and Lucy happiness against his own instincts. “Oh Mercy to myself I cried if Lucy didn’t wed,” Forster wrote in a letter as he was writing the final version of the novel. Ultimately Lucy was more successful in fulfilling her desires than Forster ever was. As he composed A Room with a View in 1907, Forster was still more than six years away from writing his great celebration of homosexual love, Maurice, and his first fully realized romance lay even further in the future. How did this repressed desire color the development of the novel? The critical literature has shown great interest in the erotic undertones of the men’s bath at Sacred Lake and possible veiled references to Mr. Beebe’s homosexuality (“somewhat chilly in his attitude toward the other sex”). Some even believe that the entire work is a homosexual romance with Lucy as “a boy en travesti.” In the end the object of desire is probably less important than the passionate sentiment. What is remarkable, as critic Claude Summers notes, is that Forster’s wrestling with homosexual desire should give rise to one of the richest depictions of heterosexual love in the English language.

Certainly A Room with a View can be appreciated from this perspective as a story of sexual awakening that provides insight into Forster’s deeply felt struggle with his own sexuality. But it can be read on other levels as well. As a domestic comedy in the tradition of Jane Austen, it brilliantly skewers the world of Edwardian manners and social codes, providing some of Forster’s most riotous and revealing portraits in the characters of Cecil Vyse and Charlotte Bartlett. It also can be enjoyed as a book about the contradictions and conflicts of being human: how we reconcile our inner lives with outside expectations, and how it is possible, by opening one’s mind, to find faith and love in unexpected places. ABOUT E. M. FORSTER Edward Morgan Forster was born on New Year’s Day, 1879, in Dorset Square, London, the second child (the first died soon after birth) of middle-class parents, Edward Llewellyn Forster, a Cambridge graduate and architect, and Alice Clara “Lily” Whichelo. When his son was just one, Forster’s father died after a long battle with consumption, leaving the family little money and making Lily a widow at twenty-five.

Unwilling to live with relatives and unable to afford a London apartment, Lily moved to a house in the English countryside, Rooksnest, where she devoted herself to her son. At Rooksnest, Forster’s life was spent in the nurturing, overprotective “haze of elderly ladies” that included paternal aunts and Lily’s friends, and he formed a deep emotional attachment to the place, drawing later on the memories for Howards End. When Forster was fourteen, he and Lily faced the disheartening news that their lease at Rooksnest was up, and they moved to the suburb of Tonbridge Wells. Here, Forster attended the boarding school as a day boy, with classics as his major study. At Tonbridge he wrote for the school newspaper and won several awards for his essays, but nonetheless it was here, a place that contrasted so sharply with his happy home life, where his feelings of being an outsider hardened into an abiding distaste for the English school system. Forster’s intellectual and social life blossomed when, in 1897, he entered King’s College, Cambridge.

With the guidance and encouragement of his classics professor, Forster grew to admire the modern European writers Tolstoy, Proust, and Ibsen, and began to test his own powers as a writer. It was during these years, too, that he first began to acknowledge his homosexuality, falling in love with another undergraduate, H. O. Meredith, who would be the center of his posthumously published novel Maurice. Meredith helped Forster become a member of the “Apostles,” the university’s foremost discussion group, where he formed friendships with many of the intellectuals later associated with the Bloomsbury Group in London. In 1901, with his formal education over and uncertain about a career, Forster, accompanied by Lily, set off on a year-long trip to Italy to study Italian history, language, art, and literature, and to work on a novel-in-progress. In 1903 he published his first short story, “Albergo Empedocle,” and soon thereafter started to write for the Independent Review, a social and political journal founded by his Cambridge friends, to which he would contribute regularly for many years.

His first three published novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), and A Room with a View (1908) received generally favorable reviews and made him a minor literary celebrity, but not until the publication of Howards End (1910) did Forster achieve major acclaim as a writer. During 1912 and 1913 Forster journeyed to India, beginning a lifelong fascination with the subcontinent. A return journey to India in 1921 provided the inspiration for A Passage to India (1924), which was hailed as a masterpiece on publication. After writing five novels in succession, then ending a fourteen-year hiatus with A Passage to India, Forster retired as a novelist at age forty-five. He spent the second half of his life as a voracious reader, reviewer, and supporter of young writers such as J. R. Ackerly and Eudora Welty. A prominent public intellectual, Forster became the first president of England’s National Council on Civil Liberties and was a lifelong spokesman for personal and political tolerance, testifying in the trial that successfully overturned the ban on D. H.

Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. King’s College awarded Forster an honorary fellowship in 1946, and he spent the rest of his years in Cambridge. Leading an active literary and social life to the end, Forster died in 1970 at age 91. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS How are Lucy’s character and mood captured in the descriptions of her piano playing throughout the novel? Why does she refuse to play Beethoven in Mrs. Vyse’s well-appointed flat? What compels her to sing, after breaking her engagement with Cecil, the song that ends with the line “Easy live and quiet die”? Forster’s use of light and darkness, vision and blindness, day and night has transparent meaning in many passages: Lucy throws open the window of her room with a view while Charlotte closes the shades. Cecil is best suited to a room, while George is in his element in the naked sunlight of the Sacred Lake. Discuss the variations on the theme of clarity and shadow in the book, for example the twilight on the Piazza Signoria before Lucy witnesses the murder, or her attempts to flee “the king of terrors—Light” in the novel’s second half.

Lucy and George both stand outside Britain’s traditional class structure. George is a clerk, the son of a journalist and grandson of a laborer. Lucy is the daughter of a lawyer and her social status is “more splendid than her antecedents entitled her to.” What role does social class play in the novel? Why did Forster choose Cecil to deliver the statement: “The classes ought to mix…There ought to be intermarriage—all sorts of things. I believe in democracy.”? Mr. Beebe is portrayed early in the novel as an observant, thoughtful counselor with a good sense of humor and an unusually open mind for a clergyman. Soon after meeting Lucy he predicts that “one day music and life shall mingle” for her. Why does he fail, in the end, to support her decision to leave Cecil for George? In comparison, Charlotte Bartlett is absurdly prudish, forbidding her cousin even to sleep in the bed where George Emerson had slept. If George’s surmise at the novel’s end is correct, what motivates her to help bring the lovers together by facilitating Lucy’s fateful meeting with Mr. Emerson? What does this turnabout suggest about the repressive forces in society?

Is she, as George jokes, made of the “same stuff as parsons are made of”? “Muddle” is one of Forster’s favorite words and seems to carry more weight in his work than in current colloquial usage. Lucy declares at the end of Part 1, “I want not to be muddled. I want to grow older quickly.” What does Mr. Emerson mean when he uses the word to describe Lucy’s state of mind near the novel’s end, saying, “It is easy to face Death and Fate…It is on my muddles that I look back with horror”? Lucy and George’s final happiness is clouded by their severed relations with those she left behind. The Honeychurches “were disgusted at her past hypocrisy,” and Mr. Beebe will never forgive them. Do you think Forster believes, as Lucy asserts, that “if we act the truth, the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run”? What is “medieval” about Cecil’s attitude toward women in general and toward Lucy in particular? What role is she allotted in his notion of chivalry?

Why does Lucy feel, after George throws her blood-stained photographs into the Arno, that it is “hopeless to look for chivalry in such a man”? What kind of companionship and protection does George offer in exchange? Forster, who was greatly influenced by the art of Italy during his first visit there, not only explores the proper relationship of life and art in A Room with a View but also uses art to illuminate his characters. What do we learn about the inner lives of George and Mr. Emerson from their views of Giotto’s fresco in Santa Croce (Chapter 2)? Why is Lucy’s outburst over Mr. Eager like “Leonardo on the ceiling of the Sistine”? A frequent criticism of Forster’s plots is his reliance on coincidence and chance. What improbable circumstances are required to unite Lucy and George? Is George right when he says of their reunion in England, “It is Fate. Everything is Fate”? Does the novel suggest an external force that brings the lovers together? There are many kinds of deceit in the book: betrayal by friends, secrets between lovers, and most importantly Lucy’s self-deceit. Four of the last five chapters show Lucy lying to nearly everyone else in the book.

Which kinds of lies are most harmful to the “personal relations” that Forster cherished? Though sparing in his descriptions of physical love, Forster often expresses the physical component of spiritual passion indirectly, as in his description of Lucy’s piano playing: “Like every true performer she was intoxicated by the mere feel of the notes: they were fingers caressing her own; and by touch, not by sound alone, did she come to her desire.” What balance between the physical and emotional expressions of love does Mr. Emerson suggest in his statement, “I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal. . . . I only wish poets would say this too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the body”? a room with a view | Word Play a room with a view Dear Reader, I had been putting off reading EM Forster for an age. I am not sure why; I think I dreaded what I may read in A Passage to India. Orientalist novels can seem daunting because they truly represent a latent and manifest racism that pervaded imperialism, colonialism, and what we call post-colonialism. I put it at arms length; I own a physical copy and a digital copy of the text.

I was wary of Forster for quite some time, but in my research for my PhD project I ran across Forster’s name. He wrote a book called Maurice that was written in 1913-14, but it was not published until 1971 because it was about the love that dare not speak its name–love between two men. I did a little more research into Forster, and I decided to purchase Maurice. At the same time I was ordering Maurice, I popped A Room with a View into my cart as well. I’ve decided to read the books in the following order: 1. A Room with a View 2. A Passage to India 3. Maurice So let’s begin our discussion. I’ve just started reading and the first page keeps popping into my head, when I’m reading other pages, walking Misha, or making food. Lucy Honeychurch and her cousin, Charlotte Bartlett, have just arrived in Italy, Florence we later learn. The setting, however, is cast as extremely English, and not even a truly respectable English, according to Lucy and Charlotte. The Signora of the pension, or boarding house, speaks with a Cockney accent.

Nor have they been granted the rooms with views that they were promised. The tables where they are eating lunch are set up for efficiency, ordered rows of English persons, bottles of water, and red wine. Behind the persons hang portraits of the late Queen Victoria and the poet Laureate, ‘heavily framed’ (1). Charlotte notes that the meat they’ve been served was boiled to make a broth for soup. Rather disappointedly, Lucy says, ‘Charlotte, don’t you feel, too, that we might be in London? I can hardly believe that all kinds of other thing are just outside’. I find this sentence fantastic. Lucy feels so at home, in this interior Englishness, not comfort, that she cannot believe that she is, physically, outside of England. This sets a strong tone for the novel, these characters are going to have to overcome Englishness, whatever those terms may be. They will be, of course, revealed to us as the novel progresses, but I wanted to talk about this sentence right away. I will likely come back to it again, but it’s just such a perfect way to start a book about travel–the characters do not even feel transported to another location because their boarding house is so English.

Briefly, before I begin to discuss the implications of this, I’d like to nod at another novel that does this. And by this, I mean create a sense of one’s supposed national character taking precedence over their location, such that it determines their behaviour or aversion to local climate. Germaine de Staël’s novel Corinne, or Italy, plays with tropes of a national characteristic. Corinne is an Italian who is passionate and full of emotion. She meets a Scottish man, whose character is levelled as cooler and less passionate than Corinne’s. He is, however, very much in love with her. But, he chooses an English ‘girl’ over Corinne because she is the epitome of duty and domesticity, whereas Corinne is too public in her emotions, she is too Italian and the English ideal is chosen. Of course, I have not gotten quite so far in the novel to know if a similar notion plays out, but we shall, indeed, see. My point, at this time, is that place and one’s ability to move within a place as either a member or an outsider is determined by a dominant culture and usually characters in an authoritative position within that dominant culture, male.

To take this point to the extreme, these tropes are reflected in European writings that discuss the idea of ‘going native’. Rudyard Kipling touches on this topic in a few of his short stories. White men lose their Britishness as they act the part of a native or, crudely, savage. This is precisely why I dislike the word savage; it is just too laced into hierarchies of race and so-called civility and civilization, always determined by those who claim authority. Let’s return to Lucy’s disappointment; her words are laced with fear, regret, and feeling duped. She and her cousin have travelled to Italy to experience Italy, not to find themselves in a coarse, English boarding house. But, I’d like to argue, this setting up of English domiciles is very characteristic of the British Empire. Ian Baucom explains in Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity that Englishness in Empire has always been discussed in Edward Said’s construction of an imagined East. Baucom makes the case that places and spaces, rather than just words and images, formed English identity abroad.

This becomes quite meta as we apply it to fiction, i.e., Forster’s novel, but nonetheless very useful. Indeed, these English spaces signified the anxieties of not having a unified sense of Englishness ‘uncontaminated’ by locals and acted to reinforce Englishness to the English abroad and to colonize and reform non-English who entered and used these spaces. via tumblr: oscarwetnwilde But what happens when even European spaces are, in fact, inundated with Englishness? Does that ruin the authenticity of that experience? Many Europeans went on grand tours of Europe, usually as a honeymoon trip. Read Foucault if you want some interesting thoughts about honeymoons and the loss of virginity. In Forster’s novel, two unmarried, young women (I refrain from using ladies, as it implies class, and I want to avoid classing these two characters just yet) travel to Italy to take in another culture. This indicates an extraordinary amount of privilege. Lucy’s mother partially paid for Charlotte’s trip to Italy, likely to accompany Lucy. It is also something to consider that Lucy’s mother did not travel with her, to ensure she was properly chaperoned.

I am sure there will be plenty to say about women and their ability to travel and occupy space, throughout the novel. I suppose this leaves us with some things to think about. How does Forster work to challenge the authenticity of the Italian experience by placing Lucy and Charlotte in an English boarding house? Perhaps, a lovely play on the notion of facades will come in–we are in Italy after all! Italian on the outside, English on the inside. I am certain class and race will emerge as central themes, as we can already see the way Lucy and Charlotte brush uncomfortably against the boarding house and its occupants in the first few moments of the book. Additionally, it is just after Queen Victoria died, how are these Victorian-Edwardians faring in the transition? Let me know what you’re reading, and if you’re enjoying it?! I wish you all a really lovely Monday and a happy start to the week. ➢Updates Uploading Schedule: I am going to aim for Mondays and Thursdays. PhD Applications: Almost there 🙂 Yoga Updates: I have not started yet, which is unfortunate. The weather has been super cold, and it has been a bit hectic around here. I could do with some motivation. Hope you’ve been so well.

Xx Heaps of Love,

Question: In the novel by EM Forster, in which Italian city was there 'A Room With A View'?
Answer: FLORENCE